We appreciate your frustration - it's definitely the case that we're not always able to do things as fast as we'd like, due to juggling many different priorities. OpenID removal is a good example of something which slipped down the priority list because the percentage of users is very small - it is a little embarrassing to realise how long ago we posted that post!
The invitations policy is designed to manage the load on the site somewhat. Logged in users make additional demands on the servers, not only because of uploading, but because they are able to subscribe to works, create bookmarks, set preferences for what they see, etc. So, it's not really feasible to separate reader accounts from posting accounts. Although some works on the site are restricted to registered users, that represents only about 3% of the total works on the site, so we hope that most people are able to enjoy reading logged-out (albeit this is no comfort if the particular work you want to access happens to be restricted).
Until recently, the invitations policy hasn't presented a significant challenge (even if it was frustrating if you wanted to read something restricted right that moment) because wait times were a matter of weeks. We are currently in a situation where demand has radically overtaken supply, largely because of the recent policy enforcement at Fanfiction.net, which has meant that the invitations queue has begun to increase much, much more rapidly, leading to the very long wait times. The same increase in demand has also meant that we've been dealing with significant performance problems, which has meant that the control over how many people sign up at one go is needed more than ever. We'd dearly love to increase distribution of invitations, but we can't do so until we have dealt with the performance issues (the 502s are currently under control thanks to our short-term fixes, but we need to work on some underlying code and server changes to make that translate to the longer term. Once that work is done, we hope to be able to increase invitation issuing such that we whittle the queue down again.
Which is a longwinded way of saying that your frustrations are valid, but we are doing what we can to address them.
You mention being frustrated by 'opacity of AO3's processes and mindsets'. We try to keep people informed about what we're doing and why we're doing it, but it's a big job, and inevitably there are things we miss and things we just don't realise aren't obvious from an outsider perspective. If you have questions about anything, don't hesitate to ask, either in comments to the latest post or in a Support request. Comments sometimes get overlooked, so Support are often the better route, but you can feel free to say to Support that you'd like to see us address something in a public post and we'll do our best to meet that demand.
Comment on Release Notes 0.8.19
LucyP
Posted Wed 20 Jun 2012 03:44AM EDT
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